Second Week's Results

Time for a follow-up of the First Week's Results on my Backlink Experiment.

The results last week ended with all of the blogs falling from Google's cache, and this was still the same on day 7. I blamed this on duplicate content so on day 7 I added some posts of my own input and linked to these from that day's entry on this blog. Amazingly, the home page blog 2 (normal links) appeared on Google's cache later on day 8. Probably as a result of linking out from here.

Day 9 still had just the home page of blog 2 cached.

Day 10 had my own posts and the home pages cached on blogs 2 & 3, plus on blog 2 another (random???) page.

Day 11 - sorry, too ill to be bothered looking!

Day 12 - this is where a difference was first noticed. Site 2 had the home pages and all posts cached. Site 3 was down to the home page, site 1 nothing.

Day 13 - seemed to be a bit of a blip as site 2 lost a few pages from the cache.

Day 14 - the missing pages are back - as day 12.

Also, it is interesting to note (as per yesterday's post) that Google has updated page rank this weekend. Here's the results of that (again!).

Site 1 - grey barred throughout.
Site 2 - pr0 on all pages over 7 days old.
Site 3 - pr0 on home page, grey barred all other pages.

So, it would appear that in terms of Google Page Rank and Google's caching, that adding target="_blank" to a link has a major detrimental effect. So far, it appears that because all of the links use this on site 3, Google has taken little interest in pages beyond the home page. Yet with site 2, which doesn't use that but does link to from exactly the same pages, Google is caching every page, ranking every page it could and I've even seen on that the count of hours since the last update to the home page.

If you are accepting links with target="_blank" in them, your are accepting a lesser quality linkback!